The Trial by Franz Kafka Critical Essays Kafka and Existentialism

Kafka's stories suggest meanings which are accessible only after several readings. If their endings, or
lack of endings, seem to make sense at all, they will do so immediately and not in unequivocal
language. The reason for this is that the stories offer a wide variety of possible meanings without
confirming any particular one of them. This, in turn, is the result of Kafka's view which he shares with
many twentieth-century writers — that his own self is a parcel of perennially interacting forces
lacking a stable core; if he should attain an approximation of objectivity, this can come about only by
describing the world in symbolic language and from a number of different vantage points. Thus a total
view must inevitably remain inaccessible to him. Such a universe about which nothing can be said
that cannot at the same time — and just as plausibly — be contradicted has a certain ironic quality
about it — ironic in the sense that each possible viewpoint becomes relativized. Yet the overriding
response one has is one of tragedy rather than irony as one watches Kafka's heroes trying to piece
together the debris of their universe.

Kafka's world is essentially chaotic, and this is why it is impossible to derive a specific philosophical
or religious code from it — even one acknowledging chaos and paradox as does much existential
thought. Only the events themselves can reveal the basic absurdity of things. To reduce Kafka's
symbols to their "real" meanings and to pigeonhole his world-view as some "ism" or other is to
obscure his writing with just the kind of meaningless experience from which he liberated himself
through his art.

Expressionism is one of the literary movements frequently mentioned in connection with Kafka,
possibly because its vogue in literature coincided with Kafka's mature writing, between 1912 and his
death in 1924. Of course, Kafka does have certain characteristics in common with expressionists, such
as his criticism of the blindly scientific-technological world-view, for instance. However, if we
consider what he thought of some of the leading expressionists of his day, he certainly cannot be
associated with the movement: he repeatedly confessed that the works of the expressionists made him
sad; of a series of illustrations by Kokoschka, one of the most distinguished representatives of the
movement, Kafka said: "I don't understand. To me, it merely proves the painter's inner chaos." What
he rejected in expressionism is the overstatement of feeling and the seeming lack of craftsmanship.
While Kafka was perhaps not the great craftsman in the sense that Flaubert was, he admired this
faculty in others. In terms of content, Kafka was highly skeptical and even inimical toward the
expressionist demand for the "new man." This moralistic-didactic sledgehammer method repulsed
him.

Kafka's relationship with existentialism is much more complex, mainly because the label
"existentialist" by itself is rather meaningless. Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard all have a
certain existentialist dimension in their writings, as do Camus, Sartre, Jaspers and Heidegger, with
whose works the term existentialism has been more or less equated since World War II. These various
people have rather little in common concerning their religious, philosophical, or political views, but
they nevertheless share certain characteristic tenets present in Kafka.

Kafka certainly remained fascinated and overwhelmed by the major theme of all varieties of
existentialist thinking, namely the difficulty of responsible commitment in the face of an absurd
universe. Deprived of all metaphysical guidelines, man is nevertheless obligated to act morally in a
world where death renders everything meaningless. He alone must determine what constitutes a moral
action although he can never foresee the consequences of his actions. As a result, he comes to regard
his total freedom of choice as a curse. The guilt of existentialist heroes, as of Kafka's, lies in their
failure to choose and to commit themselves in the face of too many possibilities — none of which
appears more legitimate or worthwhile than any other one. Like Camus' Sisyphus, who is doomed to
hauling a rock uphill only to watch it roll down the other side, they find themselves faced with the fate
of trying to wring a measure of dignity for themselves in an absurd world. Unlike Sisyphus, however,
Kafka's heroes remain drifters in the unlikely landscape they have helped create. Ulrich in Musil's The
Man Without Quality and Mersault in Camus' The Stranger — these men are really contemporaries of
Kafka's "heroes," drifters in a world devoid of metaphysical anchoring and suffering from the demons
of absurdity and alienation. And in this sense, they are all modern-day relatives of that great hesitator
Hamlet, the victim of his exaggerated consciousness and overly rigorous conscience.

The absurdity which Kafka portrays in his nightmarish stories was, to him, the quintessence of the
whole human condition. The utter incompatibility of the "divine law" and the human law, and Kafka's
inability to solve the discrepancy are the roots of the sense of estrangement from which his
protagonists suffer. No matter how hard Kafka's heroes strive to come to terms with the universe, they
are hopelessly caught, not only in a mechanism of their own contriving, but also in a network of
accidents and incidents, the least of which may lead to the gravest consequences. Absurdity results in
estrangement, and to the extent that Kafka deals with this basic calamity, he deals with an eminently
existentialist theme.

Kafka's protagonists are lonely because they are caught midway between a notion of good and evil,
whose scope they cannot determine and whose contradiction they cannot resolve. Deprived of any
common reference and impaled upon their own limited vision of "the law," they cease to be heard,
much less understood, by the world around them. They are isolated to the point where meaningful
communication fails them. When the typical Kafka hero, confronted with a question as to his identity,
cannot give a clear-cut answer, Kafka does more than indicate difficulties of verbal expression: he
says that his hero stands between two worlds — between a vanished one to which he once belonged
and a present world to which he does not belong. This is consistent with Kafka's world, which
consists not of clearly delineated opposites, but of an endless series of possibilities. These are never
more than temporary expressions, never quite conveying what they really ought to convey — hence
the temporary, fragmentary quality of Kafka's stories. In the sense that Kafka is aware of the
limitations which language imposes upon him and tests the limits of literature, he is a "modern"
writer. In the sense that he does not destroy the grammatical, syntactical, and semantic components of
his texts, he remains traditional. Kafka has refrained from such destructive aspirations because he is
interested in tracing the human reasoning process in great detail up to the point where it fails. He
remains indebted to the empirical approach and is at his best when he depicts his protagonists
desperately trying to comprehend the world by following the "normal" way.

Because they cannot make themselves heard, much less understood, Kafka's protagonists are involved
in adventures which no one else knows about. The reader tends to have the feeling that he is privy to
the protagonist's fate and, therefore, finds it rather easy to identify with him. Since there is usually
nobody else within the story to whom the protagonist can communicate his fate, he tends to reflect on
his own problems over and over again. This solipsistic quality Kafka shares with many an existential
writer, although existentialist terminology has come to refer to it as "self-realization."

Kafka was thoroughly familiar with the writings of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, and it pays to
ponder the similarities and differences between their respective views. The most obvious similarity
between Kafka and Kierkegaard, their complex relationships with their respective fiancées and their
failures to marry, also points up an essential difference between them. When Kafka talks of
bachelorhood and a hermit's existence, he sees these as negative. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, was
an enthusiastic bachelor who saw a divine commandment in his renunciation of women. For Kafka,
bachelorhood was a symbol of alienation from communal happiness, and he thought of all
individualism in this manner. This makes him a poor existentialist.

Unlike Kierkegaard, who mastered his anguish through a deliberate "leap into faith," leaving behind
all intellectual speculation, Kafka and his heroes never succeed in conquering this basic anguish:
Kafka remained bound by his powerful, probing intellect, trying to solve things rationally and
empirically. Kafka does not conceive of the transcendental universe he seeks to describe in its
paradoxical and noncommunicable terms; instead, he sets to describing it rationally and, therefore,
inadequately. It is as if he were forced to explain something which he himself does not understand —
nor is really supposed to understand. Kafka was not the type who could will the act of belief. Nor was
he a man of flesh and bones who could venture the decisive step toward action and the "totality of
experience," as did Camus, for instance, who fought in the French Underground against the Nazi
terror. Kafka never really went beyond accepting this world in a way that remains outside of any
specific religion. He tended to oppose Kierkegaard's transcendental mysticism, although it might be
too harsh to argue that he gave up all faith in the "indestructible nature" of the universe, as he called
it. Perhaps this is what Kafka means when he says, "One cannot say that we are lacking faith. The
simple fact in itself that we live is inexhaustible in its value of faith."

In the case of Dostoevsky, the parallels with Kafka include merciless consciousness and the rigorous
conscience issuing from it. Just as characters in Dostoevsky's works live in rooms anonymous and
unadorned, for example, so the walls of the hunger artist's cage, the animal's maze, and Gregor
Samsa's bedroom are nothing but the narrow, inexorable, and perpetual prison walls of their
respective consciences. The most tragic awakening in Kafka's stories is always that of consciousness
and con-science. Kafka surpasses Dostoevsky in this respect because that which is represented as
dramatic relation — between, say, Raskolnikov and Porfiry in Crime and Punishment — becomes the
desperate monologue of a soul in Kafka's pieces.

Kafka's philosophical basis, then, is an open system: it is one of human experiences about the world
and not so much the particular Weltanschauung of a thinker. Kafka's protagonists confront a
secularized deity whose only visible aspects are mysterious and anonymous. Yet despite being
continually faced with the essential absurdity of all their experiences, these men nevertheless do not
cease trying to puzzle them out. To this end, Kafka uses his writing as a code of the transcendental, a
language of the unknown. It is important to understand that this code is not an escape from reality, but
the exact opposite — the instrument through which he seeks to comprehend the world in its totality —
without ever being able to say to what extent he may have succeeded.